Buy or build a digital video editing PC? Ideas?
Someone I know is making an independent film to take to film festivals. A feature length film when it's all done. I'm helping on it some.:bigggrin:
He asked me to help get him set up with a good computer system to edit this movie.
I looked at a few Dell desktops, but by the time they were optioned enough to do his work, they were always over $1500. And what is this "hidden reserve hard drive" BS that Dell is pushing now? Sounds like a partition on the original hard drive to me.
So if anyone knows of a good factory built PC under $1500 for editing a movie, tell me about it.
Otherwise, I'll build the system on my own, which might be a better thing.
*** This computer will be for editing the movie ONLY, and will not go on the internet EVER. So it'll get Windows XP Home and whatever movie editing program he chooses, and that's it. No antivirus software or firewalls or Service Packs or anything beyond what is needed to install the editing software.***
Here's my ideas for a parts list:
TWIN 300 GB Seagate Barracuda hard drives. IDE or SATA - does it really matter for this system? TWIN hard drives for data backup / redundancy. Not RAID, just 2 drives to copy everything.
A generic computer case and an Antec power supply, 400 watts or greater.
Motherboard - I'm thinking ASUS or DFI, since they seem to be popular around here.
CPU - Pentium 4 dual core / HT, or Athlon XP / Athlon 64 bit. Will 64 bit CPUs have any advantage over a 32 bit Athlon XP / Pentium 4 HT for this job? Something with a speed of 2 Ghz (AMD) or 2.6 Ghz (P4) or higher should suffice, and I probably won't overclock it. Would Semprons be a bad choice? I wouldn't use a Celeron.
And a good heat sink for the CPU? I'll be putting at least 1 extra fan in the case for forced air cooling in addition to the CPU heat sink fan and power supply fan.
2 GB of RAM, good brand like Micron, Kingston, Corsair, etc.
Video card - what's really needed for a computer like this? Since it probably won't be used for any game playing, only digital video editing, is a fancy expensive card needed? Suggestions? Someone once told me that DV editing isn't nearly as demanding as 3D graphics processing for game playing.
A FireWire card.
A DVD burner. What's the best format for him to burn his DVD backups / copies of the movie in? +R, -R, +RW, -RW, or something else?
A 17-19 inch LCD monitor, fine pitch pixels.
Any keyboard and mouse should be fine.
And anything else I forgot to mention.
He asked me to help get him set up with a good computer system to edit this movie.
I looked at a few Dell desktops, but by the time they were optioned enough to do his work, they were always over $1500. And what is this "hidden reserve hard drive" BS that Dell is pushing now? Sounds like a partition on the original hard drive to me.
So if anyone knows of a good factory built PC under $1500 for editing a movie, tell me about it.
Otherwise, I'll build the system on my own, which might be a better thing.
*** This computer will be for editing the movie ONLY, and will not go on the internet EVER. So it'll get Windows XP Home and whatever movie editing program he chooses, and that's it. No antivirus software or firewalls or Service Packs or anything beyond what is needed to install the editing software.***
Here's my ideas for a parts list:
TWIN 300 GB Seagate Barracuda hard drives. IDE or SATA - does it really matter for this system? TWIN hard drives for data backup / redundancy. Not RAID, just 2 drives to copy everything.
A generic computer case and an Antec power supply, 400 watts or greater.
Motherboard - I'm thinking ASUS or DFI, since they seem to be popular around here.
CPU - Pentium 4 dual core / HT, or Athlon XP / Athlon 64 bit. Will 64 bit CPUs have any advantage over a 32 bit Athlon XP / Pentium 4 HT for this job? Something with a speed of 2 Ghz (AMD) or 2.6 Ghz (P4) or higher should suffice, and I probably won't overclock it. Would Semprons be a bad choice? I wouldn't use a Celeron.
And a good heat sink for the CPU? I'll be putting at least 1 extra fan in the case for forced air cooling in addition to the CPU heat sink fan and power supply fan.
2 GB of RAM, good brand like Micron, Kingston, Corsair, etc.
Video card - what's really needed for a computer like this? Since it probably won't be used for any game playing, only digital video editing, is a fancy expensive card needed? Suggestions? Someone once told me that DV editing isn't nearly as demanding as 3D graphics processing for game playing.
A FireWire card.
A DVD burner. What's the best format for him to burn his DVD backups / copies of the movie in? +R, -R, +RW, -RW, or something else?
A 17-19 inch LCD monitor, fine pitch pixels.
Any keyboard and mouse should be fine.
And anything else I forgot to mention.
0
Comments
You should go dual core. Even if the video editing software is not multithreaded, you are likely to get better performance from dual core. The best parts are the fastest AMD dual cores, but you could save a lot of money and go with an Intel D920 or D930. DRAM, hmm. In this case I'm wondering if quantity would be better than quality.
A good quality 400W PSU could run your system unless you overclock the CPU or go SLI. Personally, I don't think I'd buy a 400W PSU for any new system.
I've no experience running video editing, so I'll leave further RAM discussion and video cards for someone else to pick up.
video editing is hardest on the sub system( ie CPU, RAM, Hard Drive) then anything else
a X1300 would be your best bet agp or pci take your pick